


026 "Pepper's origins"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [26]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Post-Iron Man, Pre-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finding Pepper too unusual to just embrace wholeheartedly the way Tony does, Obadiah does a little digging and confronts Pepper with her mysterious background, involving fires, deaths, and a stay at a place called the Brookhaven Institute, for people with severe neurological disorders. If he thinks that story is strange, luckily he never learns the real one—that she’s actually an energy-based trans-dimensional being occupying a synthetic body. “I don’t want to get too sci-fi on you here, although my life has basically become one big comic book at this point so certain ideas are difficult to avoid.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	026 "Pepper's origins"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. At some point I'll post a timeline.
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

            “Good morning, Tony.”

            “ ‘Good morning’ is an oxymoron,” I grumbled in response.

            Obadiah smirked at me in his irritating way. He had many years’ experience observing my habits and moods—not that it was very difficult to tell I was completely hungover, what with the dark glasses I wore and the way I hugged the wall for support.

            “Where’s your lovely assistant this morning?” he continued, far too cheerfully.

            “I dunno. Where’s _yours_?” Okay, that was mean and I totally deserved the smack in the head with a file folder. “Sorry, Joanna.”

            “No problem, Tony,” Obadiah’s PA replied in the world-weary way I imagined one developed as Obadiah’s PA. “I hear worse from my thirteen-year-old.”

            “Well, you shouldn’t let him drink so much,” I advised. “Ow, stop it,” I complained when Obadiah whacked me again. “That wasn’t very bad!”

            “No, I was just hitting you for fun,” he admitted.

            I rested my forehead against the cool marble of the wall. “Where’s the d—n elevator?!” I snapped. “Why can’t we have one of those high-speed exclusive executive elevators with, like, booster rockets on it?”

            “Personally, I want to be _alive_ when I reach my office,” Obadiah remarked, looking over whatever was in the file he’d smacked me with. “ _You_ can have one, though.”

            The elevator bell dinged. “At last,” I sighed dramatically. But I hesitated before entering the lift.

            Obadiah stuck his head back out questioningly. “Tony? Are you coming? Your office is this way, you know.”

            I looked around the lobby of the Stark Industries building, suddenly indecisive, which was unusual for me. “Um, I think I’m…”

            “You can walk if you want,” Obadiah prompted. “But it’s a long way up.”

            I gave in and stepped inside the box, sagging back against the wall. “What are you looking at?” I asked Obadiah after a moment, since he seemed so absorbed in it.

            He smirked again, like he’d known I wouldn’t be able to resist. “Your assistant’s résumé.”

            “Oh.” Odd, but boring. Résumés, not Pepper, who was odd and interesting.

            “Did you know she has an MBA from Harvard?” he baited me.

            I didn’t. “Well, I have one from MIT. And Joanna has one from Brown. Look what good it did _her_. Ow!” I skittered away to the opposite corner of the elevator, which still wasn’t quite out of Obadiah’s reach. “That was only mean about _you_. I have _sympathy_ for Joanna, working for such an abusive boss.”

            “Thanks, Tony,” Joanna replied flatly, not looking up from her newspaper. Together the two of them reminded me of that famous painting, _American Gothic_ , with the stone-faced farming couple, only Obadiah would probably be holding a spreadsheet instead of a pitchfork. Or just the pitchfork, that would suit him, too.

            “She got two degrees in three years,” Obadiah went on randomly. “Pepper, I mean,” he added at my confused look. I had gotten rather wrapped up in imagining him in overalls.

            “Well, I got _three_ degrees in _four_ years,” I shot back, as he knew I would, “and _I_ never went to class.”

            The elevator slowed to a stop well before our floor and the doors opened to reveal—Pepper, who frowned at me. “You wandered off,” she chided me, stepping into the elevator.

            “Well, I got confused,” I replied defensively, eyeing the large coffee she had brought. “You abandoned me!”

            “I _went_ to get the coffee you wanted,” she pointed out. “And you disappeared! I was worried you would get lost.” Obadiah snorted but Pepper ignored him. She handed me the coffee but then started to pull off my coat. “Come on now, you’ll overheat,” she fussed. Considering I was holding my briefcase in my other hand, things were just getting awkward. I forced Obadiah to hold the coffee until Pepper was satisfied with the clothing she’d removed from me.

            “I dunno, Pep, I’m still feeling warm,” I told her. “I think we should take off a few more layers.”

            “Well, perhaps you can remove your shoes once you get to your office,” she allowed, placing a cool hand against my forehead and cheek.

            The elevator stopped on my floor and Pepper and I exited. “Didn’t you miss your stop, Ob?” I needled.

            “No,” he answered, walking off the elevator with Joanna in tow. “I’m going to _your_ office.”

            “Why?” I asked in confusion as the four of us walked down the hall.

            “Because we have a meeting this morning, Tony,” he told me dryly. I would’ve said ‘reminded’ me, but I’m not sure I _ever_ really knew about it. “To go over the requirements for the new fighter plane?” The ‘oh s—t’ expression was easy to read on my face. “I take it you don’t have the notes from the meeting with the general?” he guessed, unsurprised. “Or the diagrams from Design? Or the budget breakdown?”

            Have them? I didn’t even know what they were. “Aw, _d—n_ , Tony,” Joanna sighed with disappointment while Obadiah chuckled.

            “Pay up,” he told her smugly, before I had time to be confused again. Joanna was fishing cash out of her purse. “You should be nicer to my assistant, Tony,” he warned me. “She had fifty bucks’ worth of faith that you would come through this time.”

            I glared at him and his low opinion of me, made all the worse by the fact that it was the truth. “Pepper,” I said suddenly, turning to her, “that new fighter plane project. How fast can you get the—“

            “They’re in your briefcase, sir,” she assured me.

            “Well, what about the—“

            “Yes, sir.”

            “And the—“

            “Yes.”

            “It’s all in my briefcase?” I persisted. “For the meeting this morning?”

            “Yes, sir,” she confirmed dutifully.

            I looked back at Obadiah. “Ha!” I remarked in mocking triumph.

            “I don’t think it counts,” he insisted, poor sport that he was. “If it’s your assistant and not _you_.”

            “It does _so_ count,” his assistant told him with a certain amount of sass, snatching her cash back.

            “Yeah,” I agreed, in much better spirits since I’d bested Obadiah so early in the day. “Pepper’s like an extension of my body, some essential part like an arm or a leg or—“

            “Stop right there,” Obadiah ordered untrustingly.

            I turned to my assistant. “Good job, Pepper,” I acknowledged, just to rub it in.

            “Thank you, Mr. Stark,” she replied. “You’ve got a little bit of foam right here.” She reached up and blotted my upper lip with a napkin before I could.

            And Obadiah was back to smirking at me. “So Pepper,” he began, “I hear you went to Harvard.” There was no answer. Pepper merely walked along beside me, carrying my coat and briefcase. I glanced back at Obadiah, who was glancing at _me_. “Pepper?” Nothing.

            “Have you ever spoken to Pepper when I wasn’t around?” I asked him speculatively.

            “No. Why would I do that?” Obadiah was not used to being ignored and it irritated him. “What’s her problem?”

            “Have you?” I asked Joanna.

            “We said hello in the ladies’ room yesterday,” she offered.

            “Try saying something to her,” I suggested.

            “Um… Good morning, Pepper!” Joanna greeted with forced cheer.

            Pepper looked over at her, bending a little as if the other woman was partway behind some obstruction. Which was in fact Obadiah. “Good morning, Ms. Garcia,” she replied pleasantly. “How are you today?”

            “Fine, thanks,” Joanna answered with a dubious glance at Obadiah.

            He was starting to turn a bit red now. “So, what, she only hates _me_? Are you paying her to do this or what?”

            “An excellent idea,” I agreed, “but in fact, it’s even better! _She can’t see you_!”

            Obadiah stopped us all just outside my office. “Tony, don’t be a moron,” he scoffed. “Now what’s going on?”

            “I’ve been working on this theory,” I revealed to him gleefully. “Which is, my presence is so paramount to Pepper’s existence, she can’t even detect other people in the room unless she’s already met them!”

            Clearly, Obadiah was not buying this. “Tony, are you just hungover, or actively drunk?”

            “Actually…” I lowered the sunglasses cautiously and _didn’t_ feel like screaming in pain. “Neither anymore.” Which was also remarkable. But right now we were discussing Pepper, not my amazing recuperative powers.

            “Pepper, I know you’re new here,” Obadiah said to her futilely, “but don’t let this idiot be a bad influence on you.”

            “Did you want me to get the door for you, sir?” Pepper asked me politely. “Or did you want to keep standing in the hall?”

            “I want to keep standing in the hall.”

            “Okay.”

            “Pepper, take a look at Joanna’s earrings,” I suggested. Pepper stepped around Obadiah to peer at Joanna’s ears. “Would you like a pair like that?”

            “They’re quite beautiful,” she said to Joanna. “But I don’t have pierced ears,” she reminded me. She walked back to my side and continued checking messages on her phone while she waited for me to decided I wanted to go into my office.

            “Dude, you’re like a potted plant!” I mocked Obadiah gleefully.

            “We’ve met before, though,” he insisted, though he seemed more mystified than angry now. “That time you were an a-s and pretended you wanted to cancel that big meeting—“

            “Did she talk to you?” I asked smugly. “Did she even _look_ at you, as you cackled heartlessly in the background?”

            “Who the h—l does she think you’re talking to, then?” he demanded.

            “Oh, I talk to myself a lot, don’t I, Pepper?”

            “Yes, sir,” she agreed. “But I don’t mind.”

            “Tony, _if_ this is true,” he began, “and not some kind of trick one of you is playing”—I giggled at the thought, because it _would_ be an awesome prank—“don’t you think it’s a little dangerous? Not to mention incredibly f-----g weird,” he added. “But—what if, I don’t know, someone’s about to stab you in the back or something?”

            “She’s got a built-in danger sensor,” I bragged. “Try smacking me with that folder again.”

            “Gladly.” Obadiah raised his arm but the folder didn’t come within five inches of my head before Pepper stopped it with her hand. She gave Obadiah a severe frown.

            “Pepper, this is Obadiah Stane, my COO,” I introduced quickly.

            Pepper’s eyes flickered from Obadiah to the folder, which he lowered a big sheepishly. “Mr. Stane,” she acknowledged, voice tinged with suspicion.

            “Uh-oh,” I said to him innocently. “Looks like you got entered into the database in the Naughty column! Pepper, the door.”

 

            Two weeks later, Pepper was still giving Obadiah the evil eye when she saw him walk into my office with me after lunch one day. I smirked but said nothing—I had already explained to her that she did not, in fact, need to call Security whenever she saw him ‘lurking’ around the building, as she put it, and I felt it was best to downplay the whole thing. I mean, it was hilarious that Pepper looked at Obadiah like he was a serial killer, but it was also kind of impeding our work a little. Hopefully in time she would realize that while Obadiah might indeed want to kill me, he wasn’t going to do it in some obvious way she could prevent. He had always seemed the poisoner type to me.

            “Pepper,” Obadiah greeted. I wasn’t sure if he was amused, irritated, or just intrigued by her attitude—he had certainly been asking me a lot of questions about her lately, most of which I couldn’t answer.

            “Mr. Stane,” she returned coolly.

            I tried to warm the atmosphere up a little as Pepper removed objects from me and replaced them with new ones. “Pepper, is that a different outfit than you were wearing this morning?”

            “Yes, sir,” she confirmed pleasantly. “I just bought it over the lunch hour.”

            “Very nice, very appealing,” I assured her. “The skirt could be a few inches shorter, though.”

            She gave me a very confused look. “How would it stay up, then?”

            I gave _her_ a very confused look. “No, the inches would be taken from the _bottom_ of the skirt, Pepper,” I explained slowly, thinking that couldn’t possibly be what she didn’t understand. “From the hem…?”

            “Oh,” she replied, comprehending. “Well, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with that, sir.”

            I was a little weirded out myself. “Okay.” Obadiah had a hand over his mouth, no doubt covering his smirk. I turned my attention to the folders Pepper had handed me. “Where’s the… um… Nope, you gave me everything,” I decided. “Thanks, Pepper.”

            “You’re welcome, sir.”

            Obadiah and I proceeded into my office. “Tony,” he started to chastise as soon as the door was shut, “you can’t say c—p like that to your assistant!”

            “Like what?” I asked in confusion.

            “ ‘A few inches shorter’?” he reminded me.

            “Oh, Pepper doesn’t mind,” I assured him dismissively. “I would stop saying it if she minded.”

            “You’re assuming you would _recognize_ that she minded,” he pointed out dryly, settling into a chair in front of my desk.

            “I told the secretaries to let me know if she complained,” I countered, secure that I had done my duty.

            “We’ll have to send you to sensitivity training again,” Obadiah threatened, although I think it was mostly sarcastic.

            “I hope so,” I replied, flipping through the files Pepper had given me. “The seminar leader was a d—n good lay.” Obadiah rolled his eyes and made a noise of disbelief. I, meanwhile, frowned and pressed the intercom button. “Pepper, where’s the—“

            “ _I handed it to you, sir._ ”

            “No, you didn’t,” I countered.

            “ _I shouldn’t like to contradict you, sir_ ,” she replied diplomatically. “ _Shall I look for it?_ ”

            “Yes.” Instead of looking for the file at her desk, Pepper immediately entered my office and approached _my_ desk. She pushed two of the folders in the pile in front of me apart, revealing the desired file. I blinked at it, then up at her. “Wow. How did you do that?”

            “They were just stuck together, sir,” she assured me placatingly. “Was there anything else?”

            “Pepper, is this really the first job you’ve ever had?” Obadiah asked conversationally, out of nowhere.

            She gave him a look of mild distaste before answering. “Yes, Mr. Stane.” Wow, that was kind of a surprise to me—personal assistant to the CEO of a multi-national corporation was not _usually_ considered an entry-level position.

            “That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?” Obadiah probed, thinking along the same lines. “You never had a job in college…?”

            “I was saving myself for Mr. Stark.”

            My face lit up. “What an _excellent_ career plan, Pepper!” I assured her heartily. “Now that you’re here, maybe you could stop saving and get to the spending?”

            “Well, what I’d like to know is, why would you even _want_ to work for the little jerk?” Obadiah persisted curiously.

            Pepper frowned at him, which I had learned was a bad, bad thing. “I was _designed_ for Mr. Stark,” she answered, as if it should have been obvious.

            I was pretty thrilled at this point. It rarely occurred to me to look too closely at things I enjoyed, since they usually weren’t that healthy for me, so at the moment I was mostly just delighted with Pepper’s eccentric devotion and refreshing lack of inhibitions. “Wrought by the hand of God, for Tony Stark,” I cracked happily.

            “Designed?” Obadiah repeated, ignoring me. “By whom?”

            “That’s a very philosophical question, Mr. Stane,” Pepper dodged flatly.

            I wasn’t very interested in Obadiah’s interrogation, to be honest. He tended to see conspiracies and plots where none existed. “Maybe we could look for some kind of maker’s mark sometime, Pepper,” I suggested helpfully.

            Obadiah rolled his eyes—one of these days they were going to get stuck up there. “You had better go, Pepper,” he advised. “I don’t want to incite any more harassment for you.”

            “Hey!” I snapped, glaring at him. “Don’t tell _my_ assistant to leave _my_ office.”

            “Okay, okay, caveman,” he replied, raising his hands in a ‘backing away’ gesture. “Didn’t mean to p—s in your territory.”

            Pepper’s eyes narrowed and she glanced down, under the chair Obadiah was sitting in. I was not entirely successful at keeping my face straight when I realized what she was looking for. “I think that’s all for now, Pepper.”

            Obadiah could be quite persistent when he was trying to figure something out, and he was not always too particular about how he obtained his information. Honestly, I never encouraged outright corporate espionage, because the regulatory agencies tended to take that quite seriously, and besides, I didn’t want to set off some kind of industry war where I had to constantly watch my back against thieves myself. But if someone was dumb enough to let Obadiah ply him with drinks, then spill about a new design, well, that was their own fault, in my opinion. And when Obadiah mysteriously showed up with a bit of info that you would _think_ would only be found on a rival company’s internal database, _I_ certainly wasn’t going to accuse him of hacking, not without proof, which I wasn’t going to look for. (Though on those days I usually got the IT people to add yet another layer of security to our _own_ data.)

            My point here is that Obadiah apparently saw Pepper as a juicy little puzzle, and for him, puzzles existed to be solved. Not for Obadiah were the mysteries of the universe beautiful in their eccentricity, not for him the live-and-let-live philosophy… or even the apathetic, self-centered, how-does-this-concern- _me_ philosophy espoused by some of us. In short, he looked at Pepper and said, “Why?” whereas _I_ looked at Pepper and said, “How awesome!”

            I didn’t realize this at the time, of course. I didn’t realize a _lot_ of important things at a time that would have been useful. Which was exactly what Obadiah wanted, as it turned out, but that’s no excuse.

            To illustrate this relentless, devious aspect of his character, I present the following scene. You’ll notice I’m not in it, but I promise it’s a faithful account as remembered by Pepper, several years later.

            Pepper was working at her desk one day, doing her usual eighty-six different tasks while also eating, when a new email appeared on her computer. It was from Obadiah Stane, whom Pepper was still a little suspicious of, despite the beloved Mr. Starks’s (stupid, in hindsight) assurances that the other man generally meant no harm. Really, who could blame her; the first time she’d seen Obadiah, he’d been about to whack the beloved Mr. Stark in the head. Not a good first impression to make, in Pepper’s opinion. That had been three or four months ago at this point, but the memory lingered.

            Still, Obadiah was the COO of the company and it wasn’t really that unusual for him to send her work-related emails. She clicked on the message, preparing herself to pull a file, set up a meeting, or take some abuse on Mr. Stark’s behalf.

            Instead, she found a cryptic message: “Come to my office at 2pm. Don’t tell Tony. You don’t want him to know.” This presented something of a moral dilemma for Pepper, as it wasn’t in her nature to keep secrets from Mr. Stark. What secrets would she have had, anyway? (Plenty, as it turned out.) Still, there was nothing inherently wrong with meeting a company exec in his office in the middle of the day, and she could always tell Mr. Stark about it later.

            At 1:55pm Pepper informed the secretaries that she had a meeting to attend and turned over the reins of Mr. Stark’s care to them, temporarily at least. He wasn’t even in his office, actually, but rather down in one of the Design labs deconstructing a new prototype, which would likely keep him occupied for hours.

            At 2pm she presented herself at Obadiah’s office and was let in by his PA, Joanna, who promptly left them alone and shut the door firmly. This was an ominous sign, not that any more… ominosity was needed in Obadiah’s office, which was dark, cavernous, and surrounded on the shadowy edges by half-finished mechanical contraptions that lent the room the grim, melancholy air of a robot graveyard. (At least I always thought so. Pepper probably didn’t care.)

            Obadiah looked up from the files spread across his desk and flashed his sharp smile, the kind a shark gives its victim before swooping in for the kill. “Pepper! Come in. Please, sit down.” Pepper sat in the chair in front of his desk and waited expectantly. “So,” he began, with disgustingly false chumminess, “how do you like working for Stark Industries so far?”

            “I like working for Mr. Stark very much,” Pepper avowed, as passionately as was possible for her.

            “You think you’d like to have the job of Tony’s PA for a while, then?” he toyed idly.

            “Yes.” A suspicion was growing in her mind about Obadiah’s motives in summoning her here, but she made her answer clear and matter-of-fact.

            “You know, you’re a very interesting person, Pepper,” Obadiah went on, casually, as though he had all the time in the world for his Big Reveal. “Unusual, one might even say. I suppose you recognize that.”

            “It’s been pointed out,” she agreed cautiously.

            “Unusual enough,” he continued, “that I wanted to know more about you. But when I looked in all the usual places, I didn’t find very much.” Pepper merely sat straight up in the chair, blinking at him patiently. (She can be very indulgent of the occasional supervillain, or superhero, pretension.) “You went to college—I have your transcript. You did all that was required there and nothing more, that I can see, anyway. Not even any clubs for résumé building or hobbies.” (Maybe if there had been a Romance Novel Lovers club at Harvard…) “And then you graduated and within two weeks had been hired as Tony’s PA. With no previous experience, no letters of recommendation, no vetting by HR, and no interviews, except presumably with Ms. Gilson.”

            “Is that not allowed?” Pepper asked, her tone mildly questioning but steady. She didn’t want to go on the defensive yet, considering he hadn’t come to the point; she also didn’t want to sound uncertain and give him the opportunity to pounce.

            Obadiah shrugged in answer to the question. “You got Tony to sign your contract, witnessed by Ms. Gilson and one of the Board members. There’s no evidence that any… untoward actions occurred to encourage their signatures.” (Though I certainly spent a lot of those days wishing Pepper _were_ a little more ‘untoward.’) “But it’s very… unusual. Once again.” He allowed a dramatic pause while he sat up and glanced pointedly over the files on his desk. “I had HR perform the background check that normally happens _before_ someone is hired. Do you know what they found?” She waited patiently, knowing he would tell her. “Nothing. Nothing _unusual_ , anyway. But I knew there _had_ to be something unusual behind you, Pepper, so I applied a few _extra_ resources to the question. Imagine, if you will, my surprise when they told me you were dead.”

            “That’s just a clerical error,” Pepper replied dismissively, as one might with a misspelled name.

            “Nonetheless, it was never corrected,” he reminded her. “The authorities in”—cue affected consultation of a piece of paper—“Gladsworth, Pennsylvania, might be interested to know you’re still alive. They might have a few questions for you about the fire that killed your parents.”

            “I wouldn’t be able to answer those questions,” Pepper informed him evenly.

            “Oh, of course not,” he agreed condescendingly. “Not when you suffer from ‘complete regressive amnesia.’ “

            Pepper’s poker face, and body language, was excellent. But Obadiah might have noticed the slight stiffening in her shoulders, or the coolness in her voice. “I was under the impression medical records in this country were kept strictly confidential.”

            Obadiah gave a wry smirk. “Almost everything is available online these days, Pepper, if you know how to look.” (You mean, if you know how to _hack_.) “Let’s stop beating around the bush,” he announced, as if bored by his own mustachio-twirling. Pepper frowned at him and he added, in a cruel voice, “Sorry, Pepper, I know you don’t deal with idioms well.”

            “Actually, Mr. Stark and I get along fine.” (Okay, she didn’t really say that, I just thought it would be funny.)

            “I have some of your records here from Brookhaven,” Obadiah went on, knowing Pepper would recognize the name. “Why don’t I just run through the story briefly, and you let me know if I’ve gotten something wrong, alright?”

            “Alright,” Pepper agreed, not having gotten the hang of rhetorical questions yet.

            “You were found in a field in eastern Pennsylvania and taken to a local hospital,” he began, glancing over his files while also keeping an eye on Pepper’s expression. “The doctors couldn’t find any signs of injury, but you appeared to have no memory of your identity or past, or indeed anything else—including how to speak, walk, or feed yourself.” Pepper blinked at him, refusing to be ashamed of the awkward experiences she’d had. “You were quickly transferred to the Brookhaven Institute, a private medical facility for… _severe_ neurological disorders.” Ouch. “Through dental records you were identified as one Pepper Smith, who had been presumed dead in a fire that also killed both of her parents three months earlier and a hundred miles away. I found a picture of Pepper Smith in a high school yearbook.” He flipped the photo around so Pepper could see it. “Not exactly a striking resemblance, is it?”

            “Facial recognition programs called the comparison ‘inconclusive,’” Pepper pointed out, displaying little interest in the image of the ordinary-looking brunette with bad skin. “Not impossible.”

            “Still, this picture was only a couple years old at that point,” Obadiah pressed. “You’d think the similarity would be more _obvious_ , wouldn’t you?”

            “I don’t know,” Pepper answered truthfully.

            “No, of course not,” he allowed patronizingly. (That was the voice that always made me want to punch him.) “At any rate, since the doctors couldn’t find any evidence of physical trauma, they assumed your rather dramatic memory loss was caused by extreme emotional trauma—though according to these records you never actually remembered what that trauma was.” (Hey, isn’t that supposed to be for the best? _I_ didn’t want Pepper to have to remember something horrible.) “Within weeks you made rapid progress in relearning life skills—reading, talking, walking—and six months later you were accepted to Harvard University.” Obadiah gazed at her across the desk. “A remarkable recovery, even if you never remembered any of your life from before. You must’ve had a h—l of an entrance essay.”

            “It did get a few questions,” Pepper agreed.

            “You lived at Brookhaven part-time for another six months, until you were deemed able to live independently,” he continued. “And you graduated from Harvard in three years with both a BS in Psychology and an MBA. Which doesn’t happen every day, either. The staff at Brookhaven must be very proud of you.”

            “They were very kind to me there,” Pepper told him flatly.

            “Ever go back to say hi?”

            “No.”

            “You should. You’ve done very well, thanks to their efforts.”

            If he was trying to get Pepper to admit that she was embarrassed about Brookhaven and didn’t want anyone to know about it, well, he was in for disappointment. “They don’t encourage returning,” she informed him coolly. “They encourage moving forward in life.”

            “Well you’ve certainly followed _that_ advice.” He paused a moment, studying her like an exotic bird specimen under glass. “Have I gotten it all right so far?” he probed, obviously skeptical.

            “I’m sure it would be quite unbelievable,” Pepper answered carefully, “if you didn’t have the evidence right in front of you.”

            “True enough,” he allowed. “I do have one very relevant question, though.” (Whoa, just _one_? After all that?) “The other day you told me you were ‘designed’ for Tony. Apparently you’ve said that before, to one of your therapists at Brookhaven.” (I suspect Obadiah was just freakin’ jealous of me.) “In fact, they described you as ‘fixated’ on a certain brilliant billionaire weapons designer, for no obvious reason.” (Well, the reason seems obvious to _me_ —who else is as awesome?) “You watched all his television appearances, real all the articles about him, had a little bulletin board with pictures of him.” (Cool!) “The doctors didn’t seem to think your… obsession was dangerous, but I’m sure they never thought you’d get within a hundred miles of him.”

            “I would never hurt Mr. Stark,” Pepper said, correctly deducing his implication.

            Obadiah wasn’t exactly convinced, but oddly enough that wasn’t what he was curious about. “Why Tony? What’s the connection?”

            Pepper blinked at him steadily. “You’re hardly the first person to ask me that question, Mr. Stane.” (Oh snap!) “Surely, if there were a rational, concrete answer, it would have been written in my records, for you to read.” Cold, very cold.

            But Obadiah was not intimidated. “You’re saying there _is_ no reason?”

            “Perhaps he was just the first person I saw on television.”

            (“Ouch.”

            “Well, I had to tell him _something_.”)

            Obadiah let the silence stretch out. He’d already thought the entire issue over thoroughly before he even spoke to Pepper, of course, and to be honest her remarks hadn’t added much to his understanding of it. (Deliberately so.) But she had remained calm throughout the entire interrogation, no hysteria fits or pointless denials, and that seemed like a mark in her favor.

            “Well now that I have this information, Pepper, the question becomes—what do I do with it?” he mused. “Your job performance has been excellent so far and Tony certainly enjoys you. As long as those two things don’t change I see no reason for anyone else to know about your… unusual background.”

            (“Wait a minute. He thought you were basically a brain-damaged stalker, and he let me keep you anyway?”

            “So it would seem.”

            “That was very nice of him. No, really, I mean it.”)

            “I need someone to keep an eye on Tony, after all,” Obadiah went on leadingly. “Someone to let me know what he’s up to.”

            (“He tried to blackmail you?! What a b-----d!”

            “Please stop interrupting.”

            “Oh, sorry.”)

            “I am Mr. Stark’s assistant,” Pepper told him, with proud dignity. “I am here to help _him_. Not anyone else.”

            Obadiah’s eyes narrowed as he realized Pepper might be a brain-damaged stalker, but she was no pushover. “And if you want to _keep_ that job,” he growled, “it would be better for Tony _not_ to learn anything we’ve talked about. From either you, or me. It would be a little too weird, even for him. I imagine you’d be fired pretty quickly once he found out what was wrong with you.”

            (“There’s _nothing_ wrong with you, Pepper!”)

            “There’s _nothing_ wrong with me, Mr. Stane,” Pepper replied, her voice steely.

            They stared down for a moment. No one can beat Pepper in a staring contest. But Obadiah didn’t exactly give in easily, either.

            “I’m glad to hear that, Pepper,” he finally said, as though they were in complete agreement. (He used to do that to me, sometimes, too, act like we were on the same page even though we’d been arguing. It was confusing as h—l, which was probably why he did it.) “You can go now. I hope Tony didn’t miss you too much.”

            Pepper left Obadiah’s office and returned to her duties.

            “What a b-----d!” I repeated when she had finished the story. “Did he ever try to blackmail you into doing anything?”

            “I think he _tried_ ,” Pepper revealed. “Sometimes he would ask for information from your files, or ask where you were headed on a night out.”

            “What did you do?”

            She shrugged. “I always asked _you_ if I could tell him what he wanted to know, and usually you said yes. So it wasn’t a secret.”

            I thought this story over for a few minutes. I knew about Brookhaven and all that, of course—at least, years later, after Afghanistan and after I knew Pepper was a trans-dimensional being. That was her cover story, basically—she’d been dumped on Earth in our dimension in this synthetic body she didn’t know how to operate, with only a rudimentary understanding of human life and society. But that’s not usually a standard explanation the doctors come up with, so they searched around in the medical literature for something else and went with that theory instead.

            “Learning to _be_ a human was rather difficult,” Pepper had told me. “But convincing people I _was_ a human was quite easy. Everyone was very eager to come up with reasons why I didn’t know things.”

            What I didn’t realize was that Obadiah had known the cover story almost right from the start. “He always seemed to like you,” I admitted to Pepper. “Not everyone does, you know. But he didn’t seem bothered by you.”

            “Well, that was because he thought he had me figured out,” she decided.

            “Yeah, but…” Well, I never really _wanted_ to understand how Obadiah thought. I know sometimes I make it out to be very black and white, like he was this obviously sinister figure—well, let’s face it, he _was_ naturally sinister, but I don’t believe he _always_ hated me or wanted to kill me. He wanted me to string along, coming up with new brilliant designs and distracting the press with my antics, while he took care of actually running the company, including the part where he padded his own pockets by selling weapons to terrorists. I think it was really only towards the end that he decided he had no further use for me.

            Though he _did_ allow me to have an alleged brain-damaged stalker as an assistant, who for all he knew would wake up one day going, “If I can’t have him, nobody can!” and then smother me with a pillow. Oh, wait, that’s what I used to say regarding Pepper… well, I’m sure a typical brain-damaged stalker would come up with some other reason to kill me in the end. Maybe Obadiah was okay with that—like he’d allowed a loaded weapon in the house and figured it would eventually go off, with no possible reason to suspect _his_ involvement when it did. Personally I would want to have a little more control in my plans. Er, not that I’ve ever had a plan to kill someone. Specifically, I mean. Anyway…

            “Okay, I’ve got the whole learning/relearning how to be human thing,” I assured Pepper, “but what about your actual identity? Were the dental records just coincidence?”

            She gave me a look. “Of course not. It was all carefully planned.”

            “Okay, sorry, geez, didn’t mean to insult the project,” I told her. “It just seemed kind of s‑‑‑‑y how they dumped you in a _field_ with no idea how to work this contraption, I thought maybe they didn’t think things through well.”

            Of course, by ‘contraption’ I mean the really very nice synthetic body constructed to house Pepper’s energy-based essence, which I had been enjoying _quite_ a bit since we had finally become A Couple (the _body_ was what I had been enjoying, not the essence, which was a little hard to relate to). I don’t want to get _too_ sci-fi on you here, although my life has basically become one big comic book at this point so certain ideas are difficult to avoid.

            Pepper sighed and patted my leg soothingly. “It’s rather hard to practice using something that can’t really exist in the dimension you’re in.” I nodded as if I really understood what the h--l she meant. Particle physics was _way_ too abstract for me. “Our scouts had been looking for a human female in a certain age range who had recently died, preferably in somewhat secluded circumstances, and this Pepper Smith fit the criteria perfectly.”

            It was more than a little surreal to sit on the couch with the person I knew as Pepper Smith and discuss the ‘real’ Pepper Smith. “So she and her parents died in a fire?”

            “No, she shot her parents and then herself,” Pepper corrected me calmly. “We took her body away and set the fire to hide the evidence.”

            I made a face at this news—‘horror and disgust’ seems a little strong for the description, but it was along those lines. “ _That’s_ a little grim, Pepper! What’d she do _that_ for?”

            She shrugged. “It seemed fairly typical human behavior to us, based on the news footage we had studied.”

            I shifted uncomfortably on the couch. “Er, well, I have to confess something, too, Pepper,” I began. She raised an eyebrow curiously. “I _did_ do a little digging into your past, er, Pepper Smith’s past. Once. A long time ago.”

            “And what did you find?” she asked. “I think they had some information from before the fire at Brookhaven, but they never really shared it with me.”

            “Well... I googled your name and the town you said you were from, and there was something about a fire, and an older article about your father, er, _her_ father being arrest for beating his wife,” I revealed. I don’t know why I felt slightly guilty admitting to this; it wasn’t like it was _really_ Pepper’s past that I had pried into, or that just googling someone for publicly available information was _really_ prying. But at the time, I thought I _was_ about to discover the dark past my assistant didn’t want to talk about. “I just sort of… closed the browser and tried to forget about it,” I concluded to Pepper. “That was kind of—bad, wasn’t it?”

            She didn’t seem to think so. “I don’t think it was odd for you to look me up,” she assured me. “And I also don’t think it was odd for you to stop when you thought you were going to find something bad. I mean, what would you have done if you’d read I was presumed dead?”

            “I would definitely have looked into it further,” I agreed, “and you would’ve had to tell me the whole thing, and then I would’ve felt horrible whenever you made a mistake.”

            “That wouldn’t have been helpful,” Pepper pointed out.

            “I know. But you would’ve said, um… ‘Sure, I’ll eat anything’ when I asked if you liked kittens,” I suggested, “and then instead of laughing at you I would’ve thought, ‘Oh my G-d, she doesn’t know what a kitten is because her b-----d of a father beat her and she killed him and her mom in a fire and was so traumatized by it she forgot everything she’d ever learned.’ “

            Pepper blinked at me. “Yes, I can see how that would have put a damper on your spirits,” she confirmed. “Not to mention slowed your pace quite a bit, considering how often you would have had to think it.”

            “Hey, don’t put it in the past tense,” I told her. “You _still_ mess stuff up.” This was said with great love and affection, of course. “And anyway, _if_ I’d spent all my time feeling bad, I would have been really mad when you told me you were a trans-dimensional being.”

            “You would have been angry to discover that my past was not as terrible as you had thought,” Pepper surmised dryly.

            “Well, when you put it _that_ way, it makes me sound shallow,” I grinned. “Good thing I was actually _incredibly_ shallow and didn’t bother reading any further!”

            “We can all be grateful for that, Tony,” she nodded. Did I mention how much I loved it when she used my name? The novelty had definitely _not_ worn off yet.

            “All the Brookhaven stuff is actually true, though,” I mused. “Should I give them some money, do you think? Like a donation. After all, they must take a lot of patients in for free. You certainly couldn’t have paid them.”

            “They have a large endowment they operate from,” Pepper told me. “A coal magnate whose sister had a severe neurological disorder founded the place about eighty years ago.”

            “Still, I’m sure they could always use more money,” I pressed. “I mean, if you think they deserve it.”

            She nodded slowly. “I think they deserve it. They treated me very well. It would have to be done discreetly, though,” she warned.

            “Of course. I know.” I shifted around on the couch, getting comfortable. “Do you think you’d want to go back and visit?”

            Pepper thought this over. Normally of course she didn’t get too uncomfortable about anything, I suppose because she didn’t have the same kinds of social conditioning that humans did. But for her, this _would_ be a big deal—returning to the place where she’d first learned about being human, with all the awkwardness and frustration that no doubt had involved.

            “I expect you would want to come with me,” she finally said.

            “If you wanted me to,” I assured her. “If you wouldn’t feel you were going backwards too much.”

            She smiled a little at that. “I think it’s probably been long enough that they wouldn’t worry I was regressing. I wander, though,” she added, “how does brilliant billionaire superhero Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, visit a place like that without drawing the world’s attention?”

            “We’ll find a way,” I promised her. “You know, we should also get that death certificate thing cleared up,” I decided suddenly. “I don’t know if we can do that quietly, but I’m surprised no one else has ever stumbled across it—“

            “Mr. Stane took care of it.”

            My eyes widened. “What?”

            “He said he had gotten it fixed, in case any journalists decided to look me up,” Pepper explained. “He said you didn’t need that kind of publicity.” Hmm. Well, I supposed it _was_ the sort of sneaky thing Obadiah would do, cover up vital records that might make trouble for him down the road. Although in this case it had actually proven quite helpful. “He had also somehow expunged a lot of the electronic copies of the newspaper articles about the fire, maybe other things,” Pepper continued. “It must have been after you looked me up, because he said I was ‘Google-proof.’ “

            “Impressive,” I allowed. “But you know nothing is ever erased completely these days, especially if it’s ever been online. And I presume the physical newspaper archives are still intact.” I scratched self-consciously at the spot above the arc reactor in my chest, and Pepper yanked my hand away from it—she’d just applied lotion to the skin there, which tended to react badly to the metal casing embedded within it. “I _do_ have a bit more scrutiny these days, so…”

            “If the story comes out, that’s fine,” Pepper told me, still holding my hand. “People will think what Mr. Stane did, that’s all.”

            “I guess so,” I agreed. “Hey, maybe it will make me look more sensitive and compassionate.”

            “No, there’s been too many stories about your comments, Tony,” she smirked. “They’ll just think you didn’t know either.” Well, that was comforting.

* * *


End file.
